‘Smart tech’ doesn’t always live up to its name

That little red light was mocking me. Blink, blink. Blink, blink. It took me about two weeks to actually first notice it, but once I noticed it, I always noticed it.

And soon after, it was driving me crazy. My very own “Tell-Tale Heart,” just in stainless steel. But I believe that was the point. Here I was responding like Pavlov’s dog, only it wasn’t a bell and a human ringing it; it was the rinse agent light on my new “smart” dishwasher.

I have quite a history with dishwashers; I’ve owned or used them for most of my adult life, both in my domestic life and in my professional life. My very first apartment had my very first dishwasher. The first time I used it, I put regular dish soap in it. In fact, I filled the little cup designed to hold the detergent with liquid dish soap. And then I left to run some errands.

Two hours later, my little galley apartment kitchen had about 3 feet of soap suds in it. Never has an apartment floor been so clean. I didn’t know, and no one told me, that you can’t use regular dish soap in a dishwasher. Live and learn, which is a funny thing to learn for a person whose very first job was as a dishwasher at a restaurant half a decade earlier. But professional dishwashers are different than your home dishwasher. They are designed to take the guesswork out of the equation. You put the dishes in, you push the button and the dishwasher does the rest.

Once I became a bartender, dishwashing, or more correctly glass washing, became a large part of the job. Over the years, I’ve used the three-sink method, the electric scrubber brush method, the high-temp dishwasher and the low-temp dishwasher. I can’t really say I prefer any one over the other, but I certainly did appreciate the automatic soap functions.

Forty years later, there I was staring at a little red light on my brand-new dishwasher in my less-than-brand-new kitchen. To say dishwashing soap has come a long way is an understatement. You can now choose from a liquid, a powder, tablets or little premeasured packages, all of which are designed to go in your little dishwasher soap holder. Outside of the shape of the soap, the entire process has stayed virtually the same — until now.

“Add rinse agent” is what that little red light is designed to tell you. In the restaurant business, all plates and glassware have to be sanitized. It’s one of the reasons why you see bartenders polishing glassware. Sanitizing is the last step in the washing process, and it’s also the reason you occasionally get a whiff of bleach in a wine glass, a result from the sanitizer either not drying completely or the glass not being polished adequately.

Forty years of home dishwashing and I had never needed a rinse agent before. But now that annoying little red light winks at me through the darkness of my kitchen. I can’t get away from it. Sure, I dutifully bought the rinse agent for the first couple of months. But then I started to wonder. Why after four decades do I now need a rinse agent? Aren’t dishwashers supposed to be smarter now?

It turns out that the rinse agent isn’t a sanitizing agent; it’s literally a rinsing agent, and it’s usually citric acid. Citric acid causes water to sheet and not spot. Citric acid also had a brief moment in the bartender lexicon when mixologists were “acid correcting” fresh citrus. Forget using fruit that’s in season; instead, we are going to use a chemical to fix our fruit. And that chemical isn’t derived from citrus, as one might suspect. It’s made by feeding black mold a special diet and then collecting the, uh, secretions — even much of the so-called “all natural” and kosher stuff — which is why I stopped experimenting with it in the first place. In our consumer society, we are often told what to do and how to do it. What we are often not told is why.

Since I still had a 2-pound bag of all-natural citric acid around, I ended up making my own citric acid rinse agent for literally pennies on the dollar because while you can run from a red blinking light, often you can’t hide from it. And in the words of at least one philosopher, there’s always more than one way to wash a cat.

Leaving me with these thoughts:

• “There’s a sucker born every minute” is a saying often attributed to circus man P.T. Barnum.

• Funny thing, it seems that Barnum never actually said that, meaning that every person who quotes that saying just might be one of those suckers.

• “And have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the sense?” wrote Poe in “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

• When one says “smart dishwasher,” the smart part can apply either to the machine or to the person operating it — and sometimes to neither.